Assembled RealitiesJeff Chien-Hsing Liao at the Museum of the City of New York

Street
photography for the 21st century: assembled together from hundreds of
individual images, Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao’s hyperreal panoramas present
the dynamic energy of New York. Deutsche Bank is sponsor to the
exhibition, which is currently on view at the Museum of the City of New
York.

I’ll never get any better—this was the sobering realization that came over Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao during his internship at the Magnum photo agency. It was here that he was able to study classic works of documentary photography by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Bruce Davidson
and discovered that the quality of these works could never be
surpassed. But Liao refused to let himself be discouraged; on the
contrary. Over the next several years, he developed a highly unique
aesthetic and working method—a high-tech version of classic street and
city photography.

He was particularly inspired by two art
photographers, each of whom explore the uncertain terrain between fact
and fiction in their own unique way: Gregory Crewdson, who creates surreal, cinematic, elaborately orchestrated tableaus, and Andreas Gursky,
the master of the large-format image in sharp focus. His visit to
Gursky’s retrospective at the MoMA in 2001 was a transformative experience for
Liao. The highly detailed, wall-sized works presented the phenomena of
globalized mass society—and yet these images of stock exchanges, raves,
and densely packed supermarket shelves are not documentary in a classic
sense. While they are based on reality, Gursky reworks his pictures on
the computer, merging several views of the same motif to create a
single image. Everything seems larger than life, every last corner of
the picture is in sharp focus—Gursky’s works show more than the human
eye is capable of seeing. Liao would later pursue a similar strategy
with his New York panoramas.

The first project in which the
young photographer combined a documentary approach with digital imaging
was his degree work at the School of Visual Arts
in New York. He found his theme right outside his front door: Liao had
been living in Queens since 1999. After growing up in Taiwan, he moved
at the age of 18 to what he calls the “most diverse area on
earth. There are more than150 languages spoken in this area.
Every ethnic immigrant brings their own culture to Queens and helps to
create this vivid social landscape.” Habitat 7
is the name he gave to the series, which he worked on from 2004 to
2006. He took the photographs along the 7 subway line, which connects
Queens and Times Square in Manhattan, riding the so-called
“International Express” almost every day into town: observing the
stores, restaurants, and workshops from the windows of the elevated
train, small businesses run by people from all around the world. “I’ve
come to see the 7 train as a habitat of these immigrant settlers who
pursue the typical ‘American dream’ while upholding their ethnic
traditions.”

One of his “social studies,” as he calls these
large-scale works, shows the crossing at Roosevelt Avenue and 69th
Street. Each detail can be clearly seen: the Philippine flag waving
over Krystal’s Cafe & Pastry Shop,
the notes Krystal has taped to the plate-glass window in search of a
“Filipino Cook” and a “Cake Decorator,” ads for the Glamour Unisex Hair
Salon. A homeless man can be seen inspecting a garbage bin; there are
cars, passersby, people waiting—scenes of everyday life in Woodside, a
neighborhood that mostly Irish people used to live in. Over the past
years, a “Little Manila” has cropped up here, and Philippine immigrants
dominate the street scene. 69th Street, Woodside, Queens from the Deutsche Bank Collection is typical for Habitat 7.
Liao photographed the scene from a distance similar to the full shot in
a movie. Instead of concentrating on individual protagonists, with the
street itself no more than a kind of backdrop, he shows people in their
social context. Liao’s panoramas distill the dense impression of a
place’s atmosphere into a tableau in which the eye can wander quietly
from one detail to the next.

His working method is the exact
antithesis of spontaneous street photography. Before he shoots a motif,
he immerses himself in the situation on site—becoming deeply familiar
with the people passing by, the architecture, the quality of the light.
Then he arrives with his 8 x 10 large-format camera, tripod, and
film—his equipment weighs in at 50 pounds. He separates each motif into
three segments and takes up to ten separate shots of each. He then
scans the negatives and joins them together on the computer to create a
panoramic view. Work on each image can take up to two weeks.

These are fragments of the visible world that Liao then blends together, and indeed, Assembled Realities is the title of the first major exhibition of his New York works. Now, in the Deutsche Bank-sponsored show at the Museum of the City of New York, over forty of these large formats from the last ten years can be seen. Assembled Realities is like an expedition through all five boroughs of New York—with stops along the way at attractions such as the Flatiron Building, Shea Stadium, and Nathan’s,
Coney Island’s famous hotdog shop. You can take a trip on the Staten
Island Ferry or enjoy magnificent skyline views of Manhattan and the Art Déco
buildings along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Between the
high-gloss reflective facades of skyscrapers and the bright, colorful
storefront windows and signs, the historical subway station at 72nd
Street looks out of place—like a foreign body, an almost absurd relic
of former times.

Walking through the exhibition, one thing
becomes evident: the unreal character of Liao’s images is on the
increase—particularly since he began working with a digital camera:
“Since 2010, I have been trying to explore new possibilities in
photography by constructing several dozen frames of captures, sometimes
a few hundred frames to make a photograph. I also play with selective
focus, and so my newer works have this softness and sharpness, warm and
cold balance.” Like a painter, he pieces together the various different
pictorial elements to convey his own personal impression of the
respective motif.

With his panoramas, Liao succeeds in
capturing in images the entire dynamic of the city that never sleeps.
And its transformation, too: Shea Stadium, where the New York Mets played their home games until 2008, has since been torn down and replaced by the Citi Field. And he also, of course, documented the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. Parallel to the exhibition is the publication of his new book, simply titled New York,
which also provides an overview of his work. And so now it’s time for
something new. His next project is already underway—Liao is currently
photographing the nighttime markets of Southeast Asia. Their
overabundance of booths, goods, ads, and people pressing through the
narrow lanes forms an ideal subject for Liao. And perhaps, after all
these years in New York, he has just the right degree of distance
necessary to capture this visual chaos and record it in pictures. Achim Drucks

Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao's New York:Assembled Realities15/10/2014 – 15/2/2015Museum of the City of New York